Yet another world music-listening / Criterion Collection film-watching / Hudson River School art fan / camping / genre fiction-loving libertarian Mormon English teacher. And the father of 7. "The rebel of the 21st century will be old fashioned."

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I heard you on the radio last Monday talking about Mormonism. I tried calling in but the lines were busy. I tweeted you on Tuesday asking to talk about it, but you haven’t responded yet–maybe you’re busy?

At any rate, I thought this post might be a good way to open a dialogue, if you’re OK with that. Feel free to respond to any and all of the items I discuss here, or proceed as you see fit. I look forward to a friendly and respectful, but candid and productive discussion!

I didn’t hear the entire program, as I was driving around and running errands at the time, but I think I got the gist of it; certainly, I heard enough to be able to address what I think your major points were.

First, I want to offer some general observations, in the form of questions, about what I heard you say on the radio. (I’d love to hear your actual answers to these questions, please–they’re not meant to be merely hypothetical!) Then I’ll cover a few of the biggest specific issues you raised.

10 questions regarding general observations

1. You invited Mormons to call in and discuss your teachings, and this leads me to wonder: have you engaged many Latter-day Saints in conversation about your claims regarding us? Have any of them had the equivalent education and training in their religion that you’ve had in yours? Do you feel you have a solid understanding of what LDS answers to your objections are?

What have their responses been? Have you found any of those responses compelling at all?

If not, doesn’t it strike you as odd that a religion with so many adherents should be incapable of adequately explaining *any* of your claims? Might that seem to indicate the presence of confirmation bias on your part?

Do you ever address these responses in your presentations on Mormonism? If not, why not?

2. If you have not sought out responses from qualified Latter-day Saints, why not? Shouldn’t someone who professionally teaches about the perceived negatives of another group seek out responses and even rebuttals from that group as assiduously as possible as part of their own preparation? Wouldn’t that bolster your credibility and, frankly, be the most civil thing to do?

3. What have been the primary sources of your education about Latter-day Saints? What would say are your top five sources? Continue reading →

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On Thursday of this week, people in my stake read the Book of Mormon’s little Book of Enos. At the end of that short work, Enos says that as he approached the end of his life, “an hundred and seventy and nine years had passed away from the time that our father Lehi left Jerusalem.” (Enos 1:25)

That actually used to bug me–it seemed implausible that nearly 200 years could pass in the space of only three generations. Any time I tried to make the math work, it just didn’t seem realistic.

But upon reading it again this week, I remembered this story from a couple of years ago: John Tyler, 10th president of the United States, who was born in 1790, has grandsons who are still alive.

That’s well over 220 years covered by only three generations, more than 40 years longer than the time mentioned in the Book of Mormon. If you figure that Lehi might have been about 40 when he “left Jerusalem,” the chronologies aren’t far off at all. Indeed, the Book of Mormon says that Enos’s father Jacob was the next-to-youngest son of a large family (1 Nephi 18:7), and that his parents were quite old at the time (1 Nephi 18:17-18). Enos may well have also been a youngest son of old age.

179 years from 1 Nephi 2 until the end of Enos is perfectly plausible.

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I think this is one of the best Book of Mormon videos on YouTube–certainly, it gives the most information in the shortest time, and with great visual aids. Yes, this is a greatly improved version of a video I did in June. Please enjoy and share!

Does the Book of Mormon make sense as a hoax? Compare it to the 1969 moon landing.

I just saw about the billionth joke on TV about the moon landing being a hoax. This old conspiracy theory is usually referenced as a crackpot belief these days, and rightfully so.

Consider all the logical problems with the moon landing being a hoax:

Motive. Beating the Soviets in the space race? Couldn’t it have been achieved with far less effort and risk in many other ways?

Benefits. What did we really get out of this? A brief bump in pride and some cool photos? Again, these could have been achieved in far easier ways.

Costs. Absolutely staggering amounts of money were sunk into building and executing this project over many years. Not sensible if it was fake.

Means. Did we really have the ability to pull off this scam? It would have required tons of complicit agents, sets and props, bribes, image effects, and a host of lying witnesses, to say the least. The whole scheme seems very implausible.

Secrecy. With all that would have been involved, nobody blew the lid on this hoax, ever? Even when there would have been huge financial rewards for doing so?

Odds. What are the chances that all this worked out, if wasn’t real? History shows that such attempts fall apart. The singular legacy of this project attests to its reality.

Repetition. Where else has our government pulled off a hoax on this scale? If they were able to do it once, they would have done so again.

Of course, each of these seven things also testifies of the reality of the Book of Mormon as an ancient document, divinely delivered to and translated for the modern world, and not as a 19th century hoax by Joseph Smith: Continue reading →

And thus the face of the whole earth became deformed, because of the tempests, and the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the quaking of the earth. 3 Nephi 8:17, the Book of Mormon

The huge, destructive storm described in 3 Nephi 8 has long been mysterious to some and derided by others, but in recent years, some scholars have shown that the features described there (wind, earthquakes, darkness, and lightning) fit a volcanic eruption. (See here and here, for example.)

Certainly, Joseph Smith knew nothing about volcanism. The existence of this storm narrative makes far more sense as a summary written by those who experienced it.

The photo above, one of NASA’s Astronomy Pictures of the Day from last week, dramatically illustrates the plausability of that story. Volcanic eruptions do produce lightning. Pretty cool lightning at that!

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The New Republic just published a long article which includes a summary of LDS history. While repeating many expected errors (why is Mormonism apparently so hard to research and fact-check?), one passage about the Book of Mormon especially stood out to me:

By the 1820s, the jeremiad had long been a pervasive rhetorical form among American Puritans and their republican descendants. Nor was that the only connection between this supposedly timeless text and its early American context. There were references to debates over infant baptism, church government, and revivalism, allusions to fears of secret societies, and other evidence that marked the book as a product of its historical moment.

This flavor of brusque dismissal has been around since the book was published: if some fraction of the text can be interpreted as similar to some elements of the environment at the time of publication, then it must have been written at that time.

Such a myopic approach leaves out the majority of the text, evidences in its favor, and alternate explanations. It’s a desperate attempt to come up with an easy origin for the book—any explanation other than Joseph Smith’s will do—and then forget that the whole issue ever existed.

It’s ultimately a lazy and disingenuous endeavor, one completely divorced from intellectual honesty.

I’ll illustrate.

Imagine that after Jonathan Swift wrote his satirical masterpiece Gulliver’s Travels in the early 1720s, he took it to the American colonies and buried it instead of publishing it. Continue reading →

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I’ve lost track of how many articles lately, and how very many comments on articles, claim to reveal to the world the secret, sinister beliefs of the LDS Church. Their attempts at scandalous revelations tend to revolve around the same few topics, and they’ve all been squarely addressed (I covered the whole “Mormons want to become gods who rule their own planets” trope last summer), so I don’t want to analyze them one by one here.

What most strikes me about these alleged controversies, though, is how deep into obscure arcana the critics have to dig in order to find objectionable stuff. If the worst dirt you can find on an organization is based on a handful of rumors, gossip, and secondhand quotes from 19th century figures, how bad can the organization really be?

Imagine a make and model of a car that someone wants to take down. So they write some snarky blurbs about it online that show the world the truth: the company logo on the rear end is kind of derivative. And the antenna is a bit hard to unscrew. And don’t even get me started on the horrors of the rubber coating under the front passenger floor mat.

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In short, it seems that a bureaucrat at BYU has railroaded out a whole generation of scholars from their formerly-fine Book of Mormon studies publications. The era of faithful apologetics at BYU may be over, replaced by some vague desire to go in an as-yet undefined direction.

Daniel Peterson, a great advocate of the Book of Mormon, has been unceremoniously given the boot, apparently along with a host of other scholars. I don’t want to rehash the whole sordid affair here, but here’s a brief intro from a longer and excellent summary:

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A new article up at First Things recounts a Catholic professor’s experience reading the Book of Mormon. Although he does not have a spiritual experience with it, he finds much to praise in its insistent focus on Christ, and some to criticize in its drabness. I rejoice whenever anyone recognizes the former, and frankly have no argument with the latter. Though any Mormon would quibble with a few things in the piece, he brings up some terrific points–I especially like the whole “grandfather’s funeral” analogy–and the whole thing is definitely worth reading. The money quote:

Mormonism is obsessed with Christ, and everything that it teaches is meant to awaken, encourage, and expand faith in him. It adds to the plural but coherent portrait of Jesus that emerges from the four gospels in a way, I am convinced, that does not significantly damage or deface that portrait.

I came to this conclusion when I read through the Book of Mormon for the first time. I already knew the basic outline: that it recounts the journey of a people God led from Jerusalem to the Americas six hundred years before the birth of Christ. In America, they split into two groups, the good guys (the Nephites) and the bad guys (the Lamanites), who battled each other until there were no good guys left—except for Moroni (Mormon’s son), who buried the chronicles of their wars and then, in 1823, told a farm boy from upstate New York where to find them.

When I actually read this book, however, I was utterly surprised. I was not moved, mind you. The Book of Mormon has to be one of the most lackluster of all the great works of literature that have inspired enduring religious movements. Yet it is dull precisely because it is all about Jesus. Continue reading →

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Critics of the Book of Mormon often deride it for its apparent lack of archaeological corroboration. Indeed, most of the evidence that bears on the authenticity of the Book of Mormon is “internal,” meaning evidence derived from the text of the book itself. Those given to rejecting an ancient origin for the Book of Mormon often denigrate the value of internal evidence, perhaps considering anything not in the purview of Indiana Jones to not be “real” evidence. For some, it seems, physical remains are all that counts.

As someone whose interests are primarily linguistic, and as someone who loves and believes in the Book of Mormon, I find this intellectually and spiritually disingenuous. Frankly, ignoring the importance of linguistic evidence in a study is unscientific.

Consider the study of the Indo-European language family, and its prehistoric origins among groups of people who spoke a language that we call Proto-Indo-European.

As our society’s “Mormon moment” continues, with the award-winning Book of Mormon musical selling out shows and a second Latter-day Saint announcing a run for the presidency, I think we’ll see more attempts by some to “expose” what they see as embarrassing or bizarre aspects of the church. Perhaps chief among their targets will be our doctrine of exaltation. But the descriptions given of this belief will likely be grossly warped, as they usually are.

Case in point: not only was exaltation mocked as a weird, scary secret in an anti-Mormon CNN blog post a couple of weeks ago, but an article in The American Conservative this week garnered two consecutive comments that depicted exaltation in an erroneous light:

They believe that their destiny is to become a god on another planet.

and then:

Furthermore, they claim that we are all potential gods (if we are good little Mormons) with our own universes to rule one day.

Neither of these remarks is accurate. My goal here is to define what Mormons do and don’t believe about exaltation, as best as I can.

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“Show me the brass plates!” sounds an awful lot to me like “Show me the birth certificate!” In each case, whether it’s someone looking for hard evidence of where the Book of Mormon or the president comes from, there’s the tacit implication that they would be convinced of authenticity by the presentation of such an artifact.

But it doesn’t work. When President Obama released his birth certificate, there were plenty of people who automatically assumed it was forged, or that he was still ineligible for office for some other reason. Whatever anyone might think of the president, it seems obvious that some of those who criticize him for issues relating to his birth certificate are being disingenuous.

So also with critics of the Book of Mormon, who suggest that if they could just see the ancient plates from which it was translated, they’d believe. Does anyone think this is serious? As if they’d look at these plates sitting on a table, which the Church told them they’d convinced God to return for a bit just to disprove skeptics, and then scratch their heads and say, “Well, shucks, I guess that’s that. When’s my baptism?”

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There’s one big question that I haven’t heard yet about an anti-Mormon author’s twisted article on a CNN blog about the LDS Church. She says that she disbelieved in the religion at least since the time she was nine years old, yet she was married in an LDS temple, which would require a long period of prior faithfulness: was she lying about not believing in the religion throughout her childhood, or did she lie to the Church so she could get married in the temple?

It’s been my experience that people who are inactive, or no longer members, in the LDS Church, hate being asked about when they did have faith, and how that changed. They’ll often give sketchy answers, if any at all, and quickly change the subject. Fair enough—private business is private business—but if you want to be taken seriously as a public opponent of something, don’t you owe the public an explanation that establishes credibility better than this?

This author seems to base her credibility on the fact that her she was raised in a Mormon family (as if being raised by Darwin would automatically qualify you as a scientist), and the fact that she can quote distorted versions of some doctrines and out-of-context materials from the temple endowment ceremony. So she can use Google. Big whoop.

You know how sometimes a reporter will try to play “gotcha” with a politician by asking him or her an incredibly simple question, like the number of amendments to the Constitution or the name of a foreign head of state? Continue reading →

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A lot of wise things have been said of this runaway Broadway hit, but this review is by far the best:

The main thrust of its claims about Mormonism is that Joseph Smith made it all up, and that his message does not apply to the modern world. It portrays Mormons as naïve and simplistic. Of course, Mormons are also a cheerful, polite, and well-meaning bunch, and as such, are basically harmless. But the only way for them to truly do good in the modern world is to change their story so it applies to current problems, which should be fine since their scriptures were made up in the first place. This is all very appealing to the audience and to theater critics. They are made to feel superior to the delusional Mormons, while at the same time, feel good about themselves for acknowledging that it is important to help relieve suffering in the world. They don’t have to feel bad about lampooning the Mormons since the show acknowledges that Mormons are nice people, and since it is just satire, after all.

The creators of the show are welcome to their opinion, and even to advertise it in a propagandistic play (for what else is the play’s value?), but such lazy cultural tropes, in a better world, would at least be honest about the basis of their approach: an immediate rejection that the Book of Mormon, and religious beliefs in general, might have any grounding in historical fact. Certainly, again, anyone is free to conclude that such is not the case after they have considered and investigated it, but until they’ve done so, how are they honestly qualified to assert so boldly that it isn’t true?

Nobody would care a lick for a random layman’s scathing indictment of particle physics or macroeconomics. Why is it OK, even encouraged, in our society to simply spew hot air about religion? Why is so much respect accorded to the mockers of faith, especially when they present mere prejudice as entertainment?

Far more offensive than any possible content to the show is that those who participate in it, including the audience, are so satisfied of their superiority, despite a massive ignorance of what they claim to definitively scorn.

Brother X: Thanks, president. OK, let’s get this over with. How does this thing go?

Stake (“steak”? Better try “carrot”) President: Brother X, we need to meet in order to discuss some things you’ve been publicly advocating that are contrary to the established doctrine of the church.

Bro. X: Fine. I’ve got nothing to hide or be ashamed of. My ideas are just as valid as yours, and I believe this church is big enough to fit all the ideas in it that anybody wants.

Stake Carrot President: But Brother X, this is the Church of Latter-day Vegetarians, and you insist on teaching people that they should eat meat instead of vegetables!

Bro. X: Of course! Look, I totally have a testimony of the whole vegetable thing, I just also feel strongly that you can eat meat and still be a faithful, active vegetarian. I don’t see the problem here.